Practice in Still Life 3: Turning and Conversion
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These posts are part of the ongoing serialization of my new book Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures. (Full publication details are available here.)
A study of saints, mystics, monastics, and philosophers, the book explores how philosophical and contemplative practices transform our perception and understanding of reality.
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— A.E. Robbert
Conversion is a reordering of a person’s being—a shift in one’s way of life, thought, or existential orientation. Such transformations are often described through the metaphor of “turning” (conversio, in Latin), emphasizing the action “to turn” (vertere). The language of “turning around” isn’t incidentally related to moments of conversion. It’s central to them. You were pointed in one direction, and now another. You’ve turned around to another point of view. The world has changed. The Greek epistrophē also means to turn, but with an emphasis on turning towards, or turning back, a term contrasted with metanoia, a conversion experience associated with transformation or rebirth.
These different types of turning—turning towards, turning back, turning around—each capture distinct aspects of transformative experience. As Pierre Hadot explains in his analysis of these terms:
In fact, the Latin word conversio corresponds to two different Greek words, meaning different things. On the one hand, there is epistrophē which means a “change in orientation,” and implies the idea of a return (a return to an origin or a return to oneself ); on the other hand, there is the word metanoia, which means a “change in thought” or “repentance,” implying the idea of a mutation and a rebirth. Therefore, in the idea of conversion, there is an internal opposition between the idea of a “return to an origin” and the idea of a “rebirth.”1
These movements of the soul find their philosophical archetype in Plato, who uses the additional term periagoge to signal the movement that has the prisoners in his Allegory of the Cave “turn around,” away from the representations on the cave wall and begin their ascent upwards to the outside world. The word’s structure reveals a further meaning: combining peri- (signifying movement around or about) with agō (conveying guidance or leadership), it describes a form of guided travel—a transformative journey that leads one “full circle,” so to speak. The term’s combination of guidance and circular movement reveals why Plato chose it for this moment in his account. The word points to the physical act of turning but also to the guided, educational nature of this turning—a full reorientation that transforms the whole person.
This turning motion, dramatized in Plato’s Republic (wherein we find the Cave Allegory), is in many ways the founding motion of philosophical training and education. For Plato, periagoge represents something more primary than a shift in perspective. It describes the reorientation of consciousness toward understanding and wisdom, ultimately leading to an apprehension of the Good. This transformation is both personal and social. Those who have undergone this reorientation discover they must help guide others through the same journey, as the transformed person may become a transformer of other people, fulfilling the essence of philosophical training and development.
This educational dimension of turning finds its fullest expression in the Greek concept of enkyklios paideia—the method of “circular education,” envisioned as a “turning wheel” or a system of “training in a circle”—at the basis of what we today call the liberal arts. Ilsetraut Hadot noted that the enkyklios paideia is thus both a circular structure and a movement, a cyclical activity (kyklos can mean both “circle” and “cycle”), suggesting a unity and completeness in this program of study.2 In turn, a lack of paideia means no turning around, no conversion experience, no movement, and thus, no education (apadeuisia).
As important as these distinctions are, the prefix “con-” (com), meaning “with” or “together,” is also central to understanding conversion. Conversion is not exactly self-transformation, as if the self is an isolated entity, engaged in an individualistic pursuit of change. As the name implies, the turning is always con-vertare, “turning with, or together.” The togetherness of the turning can point to many things depending on the context. In other words, we always turn with specific friends, communities, places, and times and towards certain collective realities—God, the Good, the Sun, the Cosmos, and so on.
Pierre Hadot often uses the language of individual self-transformation when talking about conversion and the spiritual exercises (askēsis) that accompany it—practices like meditation, examinations of conscience, fasting, and prayer. However, he’s well aware of this collective dimension as well. He gives a number of examples.3 He says Platonic conversion is a political conversion, a transformation of the soul in the direction of a transformation of the city, the polis, achieved through the collective effort of education, the paideia. The dialectic itself—real philosophical dialogue—requires sincere companionship, a movement of friends guiding one another to a conversion of thinking. Likewise, Judaic and Christian experiences of conversion should be understood in the context of their respective religious and Church communities and their extended social histories, where the individual’s realignment with divine law occurs within and through collective practices of study, worship, and ethical life. And for the Stoics, conversion is the movement of an interior logos out into the animating Logos of the universe at large (and then back inward again).
These various forms of collective turning raise a deeper question about how such transformations occur within us. If conversion is always “turning with,” what exactly guides the direction of our turning? What draws us toward certain paths and away from others? The answer lies in the intimate relationship between attention, desire, and love. “The soul,” writes Charles Taylor, “must be swiveled around; it has to change the direction of its attention/desire. For the whole moral condition of the soul depends ultimately on what it attends to and loves.”4 This connection between attention and transformation invites us to ask a most important question: What holds your attention? Attention is directed at what concerns us, or what we care about, and what we care about is connected to our desires, purposes, and priorities. These in turn are downstream of the habits of living that create for us these orderings in our perception.
Askēsis is a method of acting on these orderings. It is both an act of attention and an act of reforming attention, a reformation that occurs through the reconstitution of our focus by a change of our priorities in perception. What holds us in attention is what we care about, and what we care about, at its highest pitch, is what we love. If, then, our knowledge is downstream of our attention, and our attention is downstream of our care, our love, then in an important sense our knowing is deeply tied to our loving, or our knowing-as-loving-attending as achieved through the transformative engagement of askēsis. We can say with philosophical seriousness: attending, knowing, loving—the same.
Taylor is writing here about Plato while making his way over to St. Augustine. For both men, we find that our transformation as persons is guided by and mirrors that which we come to love. In other words, we become like that which we love. To connect this notion back to our earlier formulation, we can say that we become like what we attend to, what we care about, or what we seek to know. These three acts—attending, caring, knowing— are different faces of the same movement, even as individuals we may emphasize one or the other of these faces at different times.
These differences in emphasis also manifest historically. In Taylor’s account, for example, he says the focus on attention is more Platonic (the weight is on knowing the right external order of things), and the emphasis on love is more Augustinian (the light of our knowing is accessed first by our inward love for God), but the continuity between the two is present in both cases. Either way, askēsis is about ordering the soul through love or attention in the context of our aim. In this sense, in our “swiveling around” we are not only engaged in a change of direction, as though we are separate from what we turn towards. We are transformed by the directionality of our looking. We start to become what we’ve turned to behold.
In the Confessions, Augustine describes himself as a man split apart from himself. His will is struggling against his own vanities and his calling to God. “This debate in my heart,” he says, “was a struggle of myself against myself.”5 In other words, the younger Augustine doesn’t know which way to turn, what to aim for, or what to attend to, and this causes him enormous strife. Indeed, the story that runs through the Confessions is about his own “turns”—from Manichaeism, to Platonism, to Christianity. Augustine’s struggle with different ways of seeing and valuing shows us how concerns and orders are intimately connected, bringing to light the very old idea that our perception of things and our moral standing within and against them share an intimate link. Our moral shaping is a kind of perceptual shaping, and our perceptual shaping, at least ideally, should be a kind of moral one. There are two primary dimensions to this connection.
First, a practical one. Our judgments about right and wrong can gain in clarity in the same way that our perception gains greater purchase on certain sensory details relevant to the goals of our specific tasks. In this sense, the arts, sciences, and engineering disciplines, along with our moral concerns, interpersonal relationships, and ultimate values, are alike in being concerned with the art and practice of perception—with nuanced appraisals of what is the case in any given moment.
Second, an ethical one. The world as given to us is not arrayed by sensory data alone. It shows up to us as purveyed by values, and this is necessarily so. We rank one thing above another. We determine this action is more just than that one. We emerge in the middle of a field of our own discernments. We are immersed in two types of entangled judgments: perceptual judgments concerned with recognizing objects or events (this is that), and value judgments about precedence and priority (this takes precedence over that) as we navigate and prioritize our immediate field of action. The attentional dimension here is thus at once moral and perceptual.
This further question—what orders the ordering of values?—is answered by the theme of to what the knowing, loving, and attending turns towards. For Plato, it is the Good. For Augustine, God. In every case, what you turn towards is what you turn to become, and in this movement we see an aesthetic dimension joining this sense of caring and knowing. If turning shapes the soul through what it attends to and loves, then shaping attention itself becomes a craft—and what you are shaping is you as a person. This is what it means to interpret askēsis as an art of perception, an art whose medium is experience itself, enacted by you the person. This does not mean that experience can be shaped into any mold whatsoever. Quite the opposite. Like all arts, it means that experience is a medium that allows for certain techniques, has specific constraints, and can offer certain kinds of opacity or illumination, all expressed in relation to the objects of our attention from the perspective of the type of creature we are, the concerns that we have, and the type of world we inhabit.
In this context, what one turns towards becomes a vital, existential concern. This choice is at the root of how Pierre Hadot understood philosophy as a way of life, with the different schools—Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, etc.—opening out onto a view of humanity, the world, and our ultimate purposes. As he says, “The philosophical school thus corresponds, above all, to the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way.”6 Our voluntary choice in following a way of life is in this way both what sets the aim of our transformation and is how this transformation can be accomplished. In other words, attention opens out onto reformation just as reformation realigns our attention.
To close the circle, this shows us why conversion is always both personal and collective. The turning motion of conversion—whether understood as epistrophē, metanoia, or periagoge—is simultaneously a turning with others and a turning towards what we attend to and love. Through this double movement, we shape not only our perception and moral understanding but our very being, becoming what we behold in the company of those who share our path.
Choose wisely.
This chapter is an excerpt from Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures, by A.E. Robbert, out now in Kindle, paperback, and ebook formats. Consider buying a copy today. All proceeds go towards supporting the research and writing you find here at The Base Camp.
Pierre Hadot, The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot, trans. Matthew Sharpe and Frederico Testa (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 93.
I. Hadot, “Greek Philosophy and Encyclopedic Knowledge,” trans. Janine Alexandra Trees, with Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Diogenes 45/2, No. 178 (1997): 33–47
Hadot, Selected Writings, 93–104.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 128.
St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8.11.27.
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.